Archive for the 'non-geeky' Category

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Yahoo gets into the community currency game

Published on September 14, 2006 in community currency and non-geeky. 3 Comments

It looks like yahoo is getting into the community currency game with Yootles. A quick read of the their FAQ indicates a highly “economics” based approach. Also I don’t see an indication of the meta understanding that what’s necessary is to provide a playing field for people to create currencies, rather than just Yet Another Currency (YAC).

But, there is a very interesting quote buried near the end:

“My long-term goal at Yahoo is to change the way society thinks about group decision making. Step 1 is changing the way we think about money. I want people to think about money more the way computer scientists and AI resarchers and theoretical economists think about it — as a measure of people’s utility functions, which is where the name yootles comes from.”

An here’s another in answer to the question: Why not just use money?


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“But you’re quite right, it’s just another currency. Everything you know about money should carry over to yootles and if you spot any meaningful differences, we’re probably doing something wrong.”

Hmmm….

[tags]currency, yootles, community currency, money[/tags]

Currency “Equity” (Yet another community currency metaphor)

Published on August 30, 2006 in community currency and non-geeky. 0 Comments

“Don’t worry, it’s a rental.” That’s what we say when we drive that Hertz car smack through a pot hole. The difference between how people keep up rented appartments and owned homes is a standard trope in our culture. We understand that people feel and behave differently about things that they own.
The same must be true for currency. If we create our own currency, instead of rent it from a unknown source, we will treat it differently. In fact, we will probably do a lot of things differently, just because it’s ours and we own it. Probably most importantly, we can begin to thing about the “value” of the currency in a different way. We clearly understand that the value of a home is not encoded simply in the number of dollars we’ll get from it when we sell it. It’s true value is in the home’s utility to us, here and now. Oddly, the same is true of a currency. Selling a currency on an exchange market is like selling a house. It shows one kind of value that it has; it’s value to people who are comparing the overal value of two separate currencies (just like someone about to by a house may be comparing the overall “value” of two houses). But a currency, like a house, has the utility value of those who use it, which is of substantially different form than its exchange value.
There are other things that might be different if we own our currency instead of rent it. Our relationship with debt might be different. For one thing, we would come to a deeper understanding of the connection between debt and money, and thereby be more healthy about it. The monetary experience is by its fundamental nature is the combination of debt and credit. The money I hold in my pocket is positive side of the ledger that elsewhere is written down as a negative number: a.k.a debt. It is not possible to have money without debt. If we owned our own money, the question of what kind and what amount of debt we want to have would become much more crucial to answer well and wisely.

Of course, there would also be risks. It’s risky to own a house. If it burns down, you lost it, not the land-lord.

What other kinds of difference will there be when we become equity stakeholders in our currency system?

[tags]currency, equity, debt, ownership, community currency, money, metaphor[/tags]

Phronesis and the Internet: the Process Revolution

Published on July 11, 2006 in coding/software, collective intelligence, community currency, non-geeky and open source. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I learned about the Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a few years back from Kathryn Montgomery in discussions about her book How Doctors Think. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors and entrepreneurs have that is based on experiential knowledge and provides the ability to take the best action in particular circumstances. We are much less likely to have thought of this as a separate kind of rational capacity.
These terms came up again recently for me in the context of a collective intelligence discussion, which really set my mind going and has led me to some propositions and a conjecture:

Proposition: Whereas the printing press was an episteme engine, the Internet is a phronesis engine.
Alternative long phrasing: The printing press and the Internet are cognitive technologies that provide people and cultures with “mechanical advantage” or leverage for the development of the Aristotelean intellectual virtues of epistome and phronesis respectively.

It’s pretty easy to see how the printing press is responsible for the massive scaling of epistome into the general culture. It’s a bit harder to see how what the Internet is doing is the same for phronesis because our first viewing of the Internet (the web at least) has been that it’s just one giant sales brochure/advertising billboard/encyclopedia/etc, i.e. that it is a global source of knowledge. My proposition is that the key thing going on with the Internet is not access to knowledge, but rather access participation in knowledge processes. Three examples:

  1. Wikipedia. What really matters about it is not that we have access to a massive knowledge font, but rather that each of us can become encyclopedists and have to face the questions of ontological classification, neutral voice, objective/subjective reality, etc, that that entails.
  2. Blogs. A word perhaps for at least three information processes moved out mass culture: journalism, publishing, political analysis. Again the key shift is not that there is all this reporting/publishing/political analysis available for our consumption, but that that each of us can become journalists/publishers/political analysts.
  3. My own online-writing workshop. People come to the site thinking that they will get reviews of their writing which will improve it. They invariably discover that reviewing the work of others is how they end up learning to improve their own writing.

In each of these cases the key thing is the shift from access to static information, to active participation in an information process. The Internet is providing a “mechanical advantage” for putting people together in a place where they can jointly engage in the kind of information processes and processing that I think leads to the developing of phronesis.

Proposition: Economic revolutions occur when aspects of production are sufficiently amplified by cognitive technologies that new economic patterns of production come into being. Example: the printing press provided the intellectual infrastructure (a culture of epistome) for the expansion of the simple tools of production during the industrial revolution into what is called Capital in the classical economic sense.

Proposition: There is a new economic revolution under way, the Process Revolution, that is the result of the amplification of information and information processing by the cognitive technology of the Internet, and which is similarly bringing new economic patterns of production into being. These patterns are a new economic factor that can be called Information (capital I), which is defined (analogously to Capital) as the data plus the patterns and processes that use that data to organize production.

Proposition: New economic factors produce competing political systems that are answers to the question: who should own the new economic factor. Example: In the industrial revolution the question was: who should own Capital and the products produced by Capital. Communism proposes common ownership in the form of the State, and Capitalism proposes ownership by individuals.

Proposition: The new economic factor of Information is likewise producing competing approaches to answer who should own it. “Ownerism” which proposes the same answer as Capitalism (ownership by individuals, natural or corporate), and “Commonism” which proposes that its ownership be held in the commons (not by the State).

Proposition: Capitalism won out against Communism for three fundamental philosophical and systemic reasons:

  1. Capitalism was better at recognizing and building on individual dignity and potential.
  2. Capitalism is essentially decentralist because it pushes the intelligence out to the edges (see David Reed & Andrew Lippman’s paper on Viral Communication for details on this idea) where local information can be used to maximum advantage in decision making.
  3. Capitalism works with, not against people’s natural self-interest.

Conjecture: Commonism will win out over Ownersim because it shares with Capitalism the same first two properties as well as another property which is analogous to the third, namely that Commonism works with Information’s natural abundance and it’s tendency to flow everywhere, whereas Ownerism has to fight tooth and nail to keep it scarce and from getting out.

I’ve put together a more detailed presentation of these ideas (including their relation to money) in the form of a paper.

Viral Communications

Published on July 7, 2006 in community currency, non-geeky and open source. 0 Comments

I’ve just read Andrew Lippman and David Reed’s paper on Viral Communications. It’s quite insightful. Two things:

  1. I’ve said it before, but “Intelligence at the Leaves” for currency is what the open money project is all about. Currency is the centralized communication tool that needs to undergo the same process that Lippman and Reed describe in the paper, for all the same reasons. “In the end, viral communications transforms communication from something you buy to something you do. Independence of operation allows communications services to be separated from traditional service providers.” Substitute currency for communication.
  2. On a more speculative note: maybe the reason why SETI has not been successful so far, is that intelligent species move very quickly to low power Tim Shepard style scalable radio! So our current high power RF output is very naturally a short lived (i.e. 200 year) stage in technological development, that lasts only long enough for us to realize that we are better served with a very different pattern of radio usage, which is not detectable at interstellar distances. Assuming this is true, I’d gues that the probablity of catching another intelligence in the same 200 year window is not very high.

[tags]viral communication,viral,SETI,open money,currency,money,scalable radio,David Reed,Andrew Lippman,Eric Harris-Braun,p2p[/tags]

God Bless America

Published on July 4, 2006 in non-geeky and random. 0 Comments

On this July 4th, I’m thinking that God has already blessed America, many times over, with great natural resources, with a powerfully and deep intellectual, spiritual, and political heritage that is the product of the coming together of many strains of human history. We are a blessed melting of many metals that make an alloy of unusual qualities.

Our task is to share these blessings, not to greedily ask for more.

[tags]God,bless,America[/tags]

BALLE presentation on open money

Published on June 27, 2006 in community currency and non-geeky. 1 Comment

Here’s the power-point version of the presentation on open money I gave at the local currency preconference to the BALLE gathering in Burlington last month. The presentation came after a full day of folks like Bernard Lietaer and Tom Greco excellently setting stage by explaining how our current monetary system is both unstable and the structural underlying cause of many of our economic woes. They explained clearly how changing the monetary system is a necessary step for fixing our economic system.

So this presentation was aimed at showing how a decentralized community currency network platform in which individuals and communities are given the power to create an ecology of currencies, is the necessary second order mechanism so that we can change our monetary system. I argued that not only do you have to change the monetary system, but that you have to change how we change. This is a second order change. Which in this case, I propose, means setting up a system that allows for decentralized broad-based creation of many types (most yet unknown) of currencies in a unified network platform. Without that second order change in place I don’t think the system can be changed.

By the way, the red fish in the presentation is a herring. Get it, get it? :-)

[tags]open money,local currency,money,community currency,BALLE,Eric Harris-Braun[/tags]

the case for local currencies: money as technology

Published on May 29, 2006 in community currency and non-geeky. 0 Comments

Below is part of a talk I gave at the E. F. Schumacher Society seminar Tools for Change.

I’m assuming that at least one of the reasons why you are all here because you understand that the current economic order isn’t leading us down a healthy path. This is pretty easy to explain and to see as manufacturing jobs are outsourced, as land goes fallow and is developed into unsustainable strip malls, and as workers are more and more disempowered. These are very visible things that we hear about all the time in the independent media, and even in the main-stream media. But it’s much more difficult to see, let alone, explain, the role of our monetary system in all this. So my goal here is to give you the basic tools to explain why we need local currencies. That is the “The case for local currencies.”

I’m going to spill the beans on the case for local currencies as I see it in just one sentence: I can’t live out my values without local currencies. It’s as simple as that. I can’t live out my values with out them. This is because money is actually a technology. Like all technologies, it has effects on two levels, one is the functional level in which it’s effects on society are related to our choices of how we use the technology, and the other is the structural level, where the effects are not ours to choose, because they are the result the nature of the technology itself.

The first level of connection between values and money is fairly broadly understood. At this level the connection between money and values is functional, that is, it’s about how we use it.. We know that if we are to live by our values, we must align how we spend and invest our money with those values. The breadth of understanding of this connection between money in values this is reflected in the growth of excellent things such as Erbin’s fair-trade movement and the socially responsible investing.

The second level of connection between money and values, the level of structural connection, is less broadly understood A this level we see that our values are not just expressed in how we use money, but are encoded into the structure of money itself. As we come to understand that money is just another one of our technologies, it becomes much easier to understand this second level in the case of money.

As a culture, we’ve come to understand the effects of our technologies both levels. We see that technologies are not value neutral, that the use of this or that technology in and of itself has effects because of the nature of the technology that is independent of how we choose to use it. For example, internal combustion engines emit CO2 whether they are in a tank or in a tractor. Even though the internal combustion engine is wonderful at one level (let’s face, it makes the good parts of modern lives possible), at a wider systemic level, it has a the devastating effect on the biosphere that we call global warming.

What we need to understand is that money is another one of our technologies, and just like the internal combustion engine, at one level, conventional money is great, but at that wider systemic level, it is devastating the entire econosphere.

Raise your hand’s if you are thinking: “wait, wait, you’ve got his analogy all mixed up. It’s not the internal combustion engine’s production of C02 that’s the cause of global warming, it’s the fact that petroleum is used as fuel.” (This is because the carbon in the oil is taken out of the ground where it’s been sitting safely for millions of years, and pumped into the atmosphere. We could run the same internal combustion engines with bio-fuels and add absolutely no net C02 to the atmosphere because the C02 it puts out, was just extracted from the atmosphere that year by the crops grown to produce the biofuels. Global warming solved.) Well, you get the gold star, and that’s a key thing, because that points to a structural solution to the problem. If you change the fuel, you have suddenly aligned structurally aligned the technology with your values of not destroying the biosphere. By noticing this, you’ve focused on the structural, not functional aspect of the technology. Local currencies are about doing that with money.

So what’s the CO2 (or petroleum) of money? Well just like CO2 isn’t the only thing that’s going on in the global warming equation, the situation with money also has many variables. However, not surprisingly, here at the Schumacher Society, we’d say that the C02 of money is its centralization. Or more specifically, the CO2 of money (the part of the technology that has deep side-effects on the econosphere) is that its issuance is strictly controlled by centralized monetary institutions. The case for local currencies is built on examining what happens if we take away that centralized aspect of money, and we let communities, businesses, and even people issue money.

[tags]money,local currency,community currency,peak oil,global warming,technology,value neutral,economy[/tags]

thoughts on a retreat

Published on April 10, 2006 in collective intelligence, non-geeky, open source and spirituality. 0 Comments

In March I participated in a retreat that is somewhat hard for me to describe. It’s hard because I fear being judged. So, to my more materialist friends I want to describe it as an experiment in developing the practices of collective intelligence and collective wisdom and stick to the intellectual content. To my more spiritually oriented friends I want to describe it as a re-inventing of the practices of Quaker corporate worship in the context of the post-post-modern, quantum/relativist, networked, Wilberized, self-conscious and what-else-have-you, world.
But this splitting into the mental and the spritual to appease my imagined world view of this or that friend, is a mistake. A huge mistake. So now I declare: go ahead and judge me!
Here’s a better description: I participated in a retreat where a small group of people together worked on integrating all levels of their awareness: physical, emotional, mental, and “soul,” into a single group awareness. I put soul in quotes because there is common agreement that parts of our conciousness are separately devoted to physical, emotional, mental awareness, and we have decent language to talk about those three types of perception, but we don’t have good language or terms to talk about “soul” perception, or even agreement that such a form of perception is even “real” (what ever that means!) and has a similar status as the other three. [And now I'm noticing that that last sentence is yet another caveat to try and prevent judgement.]
For those of you with a scientific/materialist bent I recommend reading Jean-François Noubel’s paper on collective intelligence. This paper mentions only in passing at the very end the need for personal transformation. But it was that part that is what the retreat was all about. The practicing of that transformation to begin to make possible the potential for real collective intelligence.
If you aren’t turned off by spiritual language, try the sacred circle web site.
Some things I learned: I am generally very unaware of my body, and what it has to offer me. If I change the way I sit, I change the way I perceive. I can tell when people are speaking from a place of fear. If I take my glasses off, I can’t see detial, but detail is not all there is to see. The things that I am naturally good at, that come easily to me, are my gifts to the world. If I toss them out as if they don’t matter, I disempower myself and those gifts at the same time. One of the key structural benefits of the open source world is that it requires the formation of human relationships. Because it’s free, i.e. the value it generates has not been monitized, you can’t rely on money to get you what you want, instead you have to either rely on yourself, or, prefereably, rely on relationships with others. I am afraid of esoteric, new-agey, airy-fairy, “stuff” and I have a hard time just being with it when it shows up. Taking on and accepting as true things that people say is very different from being with them and actually listening to what they have to say. There are many levels of listening, at least four of which are: from the past (where we try and understand what we hear based on what we already know); with an open mind (where we try and learn new things that we don’t know); with an open heart (where we try and put ourselves empathically in the position of the speaker and really listen to where they are coming from); and with an open will (which is harder to describe, but it is deeper than the other three, and is similar to the experience of listening for the sense-of-the-meeting when clerking a Quaker meeting for worship with a concern for business, where not only are you listening from all the three other levels, but you’re basic will, i.e. your desires, are left open and subject to modification). Quakers already know a ton about collective intelligence and the practial stuff about what is needed to move foward in this realm, but they suck at integrating body and emotion into mental and “soul” practice. If you get into this work, it will have ramifications on your “personal” relationships.
[tags]quakerism,collective intelligence,open source,FLOSS,Ken Wilber[/tags]

power and love

Published on April 5, 2006 in non-geeky and random. 1 Comment

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites-polar opposites-so that love is identifiedwith the resignation of power, and power with the denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.�
–MartinLuther King Jr.
[tags]love,power,MLK,quotes[/tags]

open source spirituality

Published on March 25, 2006 in non-geeky, open source and spirituality. 0 Comments

The open source movement is, I think, the tip of the iceberg of a fundamental sea change in human thought that is swirling all around us. I had been emailing with a friend about how Quakerism seemed to me to embody in a religion,the principles of open source software because (I wrote) “it handles the balance of the community and the individual in a precise way: 1) the individual is highly autonomous and assumed to have unique and direct access to the devine. I.e. everybody can write code. 2) because this is true of everyone, individual revelation must be checked with the group for further descernment, i.e. your code has to be checked in to the repository and actually work with the whole system! Thus there is no preacher/parishoner or consumer/producer relationship, we all minister to eachother (we are all prosumers).”
My friend pointed me to various links on open source spirituality that are worth looking at. I was especially intruiged by yoism which at first seems like yet-another-newagey spirituality thingy, but on closer inspection is quite a bit more than that.
[tags]spirit,FLOSS,yoism[/tags]

The City of Ember, by Jeanne Duprau (2003)

Published on January 22, 2006 in books and non-geeky. 0 Comments

The City of Ember is a young adult novel that is a fantastic allegory for spiritual awakening, though I have no idea if it was intended as such. The story is of a girl who lives in an underground and completely self-contained city created by the “Builders.” The population of the city knows of nothing outside the city, in fact, though they speak English many of the words in it like “sky” are not understood in any terms but metaphorically. The problem is that the city is falling apart, the lights are going out, the vast stores of supplies of light bulbs, canned food, and vitamins are running out. The reader is in on a worse calamity, namely, that a secret message in a timed lock box that was left by the Builders, which was meant to be handed down from mayor to mayor and that would open just in time to explain to the city dwellers how to get out of the city, was lost many generations back. Well, being a young adult novel it’s pretty predictable in that the box is in our hero’s closet, but a nice turn of events it is found by our hero’s baby sister who chews on it for a while before our hero gets her hands on it leaving the message is only partially legible. So the bulk of the story is the deciphering of the message, followed by the experience of trying to communicate its contents to the adults, who of course don’t accept the message (where else is there but here?) which is the equivalent of all prophets experiences of rejection by the status-quo. And finally, there is the adventure of eventual escape.
This book reworks the universal theme of Plato’s cave, and of all mysticism. What we think of as the whole universe is but shadow, and further, that to enter that “kingdom of heaven” you must be like a child. The insight that this version of that universal story led me to is part of the answer to why childishness is a necessary component of the transformation. Children haven’t yet become someone. Which means who they are is not yet at stake. For some reason our culture has this question “what are you going to be when you grow up?” Think about the hidden structures and assumptions in that question. Who are you? Have you figured it out yet? Is what you do, who you are? Is what you believe who you are? Is who you associate with who you are? I write these questions myself in shadow not in the condition of childishness, and with all of this, as Quaker’s say, “a notion,” i.e. not something that I have experienced, but rather something I think. But this thing that is mostly a notion for me, that the distinction between notional and experiential living is key to awakening, I am begining in small ways to actually experience.
[tags]awakening,experience,cave,Plato,mystics[/tags]

the role of conventional money

Published on November 18, 2005 in community currency and non-geeky. 2 Comments

Since mutual credit money is truly valueless, it cannot BE a unit of measure. It must USE a unit of measure. This means that there must be something with which to set the price of things. You could use chickens or bales of tobbacco or kilowats, or hours as your unit of measure in which the mutual credit money is denomitated, but you can’t really do this because the “value” of any of those things varys across and within communities. Instead, the proper unit of measure is a conventional money, which is determined by an arbitrage market. So in fact, I think what I’m claiming is that the true role of conventional money is to determine aggregate value of things, skills and time, to be a unit of measure. Once we have that (which we allready do), then we can do the bulk of our exchanging using mutual credit money.
[tags]money,mutual credit,LETS,price,value[/tags]

money & spirit

Published on November 18, 2005 in community currency and non-geeky. 0 Comments

For that last 2 years I’ve begun a process of examining perhaps one of the most fundamental ways that I “participate in the consumer economy” and that is simply my use of money, specifically US dollars. Before this period money seemed primarily mundane. Money was just a practical thing about living life. It’s there, and I didn’t question it very much. In my mind, the connection between money and spiritual matters was mostly from biblical quotes, for example “the love of money is the root of all evil,” “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” “seek ye first the kingdom of the lord and his righteousness,” the kicking out of the money-changers from the temple, and perhaps the most influential for me is where Jesus says “look at how beautifully God as clothed the lilies of the field, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed such as they, how much more will he care for you?” All of these quotes set up the primacy of ones spiritual life and faith in the divine provider over what ever promise of security we might find in money. In a sense, these are all more about the disconnection between money and those higher spiritual aims.

These last two years, however is bringing me to a new place. I’m now seeing that at least some of the power of money to distract us from the divine, is not inherent in money itself, but rather in the form of our current monetary system, and further that news types of money can be re-invented such that much of that power is removed from it, even more so, such that money itself will become yet another part of living a God centered life. If so, that would be a real step toward achieving that third QIVP purpose. An economy more aligned with our Quaker testimonies.

At the most fundamental level, money is the information that encodes who has how much of a claim on things of value in a community. Historically this information was encoded very simply in the the ownership of scarce metals. Later we used paper that was legally equated to that same scarce metal. Our current monetary system no longer equates the medium of exchange with gold, but it it still relies on treating that information, be it paper or numbers in a bank account, as valuable in and of itself by maintaining its scarcity. How is it possible to make information scarce? It’s difficult, but that’s exactly what our monetary system is, a large body of regulations that use the coercive force of law to create a very precise scarcity of the medium of exchange (information) so that it will “maintain its value.” That’s exactly what’s going on when the Fed changes interest rates.

The assumption behind this is that people won’t use a medium of exchange to trade if the medium itself is not valuable. In other words, the medium of exchange will only work if you can trust it, and the way to make it trustworthy is to make it valuable. Well, there’s one case where this equation doesn’t apply. Namely when you are trading with people whom you trust. If you trust the people with whom you trade, then you don’t need to trust in the medium of exchange itself. The medium of exchange can just devolve into its purest form, i.e. simply the record of who has a claim on the economy.

Here’s how it works: when you trade with another individual, money (information) is created on the spot. How? With a ledger book. If I buy something, I subtract from the balance in my ledger the price of the item, and seller adds the price to balance in her ledger book. Remember that money is just the information on who has a claim on the economy. So now, the seller has a positive value in her ledger book. That positive value represents the claim she has on the community. The negative value in my ledger represents the obligation I have to give to the economy. In this system money is created on the spot by the purchaser and given to the seller who then has a claim on the economy (as represented by the positive value in the ledger book), a claim which will be redeemed when seller in turn goes to purchase something from someone else, just as the obligation of the purchaser will be fulfilled later when he or she sells something.

So if the medium of exchange isn’t valuable in and of itself a whole world of things change: the task becomes how to enlarge the circle of people I trust so I can trade in using this incredibly available money; I don’t have to earn it, I can create it on the spot, as long as it’s being used in a circle of trust people will know that I won’t create more than I can redeem; relationships become primary.

To me this is the fundamental spiritual issue of money: Do I trust my neighbor? Do I trust that of God in my neighbor enough to transact with him or her and not have the coercive force of law in place to back up the claim I might have in my ledger book? Our US dollars say “in God we trust” but we don’t, we trust in the coercive force of law that backs the dollar.

[tags]money,spirit,trust[/tags]

what money is worth

Published on November 4, 2005 in funny and non-geeky. 1 Comment

Michael & Eric are walking down the road talking about what people will do for money. Michael sees a steaming pile of dog poop and says: “Eric, I’ll give you 20 grand if you eat some of that.” Eric thinks, wow good deal, and does. Michael says “ok, I owe you 20k.” A little while further down, there’s another dog pile, and Eric says to Michael, “I’ll give you 20,000 big smacker if you eat some of that.” And Michael thinks, that’s an easy way to cancel my debt, so he does. They walk for a few more minutes and Eric says: “whoa, we both just ate dog shit and none of us is a penny richer!” Michael says, “yeah, but the Gross National Product just went up by 40K!”
[tags]joke,money,GNP[/tags]

the “free software” of land ownership

Published on April 23, 2005 in non-geeky and open source. 0 Comments

The FLOSS movement has questioned (or at least provided an alternative to) private ownership of software. One can, on very similar grounds, question private ownership of land (and historically the followers of Henry George have). Recently the E. F. Schumacher Society has published its work on forming community land trusts including actual legal documents that have been used to set up these organizations. Private ownership of land is burned much deeper into our psyche’s than private ownership of software. Thus even though many of the exact same issues are at stake, we are much less likely to see these two realms of ownership in the same light. The Schumacher Societie’s approach, however, bears close study because it steers so far clear of communistic and centralized approaches that we might rightly fear.
[tags]community,land,FLOSS,CLT[/tags]

Of Wheat & Gold, by Christopher Houghton Budd (1988)

Published on March 5, 2005 in books and non-geeky. 0 Comments

This little book is very interesting in that it is a sandwich of extremely cogent and clear understanding of the relationship of money and economics to spirituality and human values, with a filling of a very problematic practical solution. He gets right the fact that our current money system is one design out of many possible, and that it’s based on scarcity, and what that means for our world. And he has some very surprising and insightfull things to say about surplus, i.e. more than just the usual “our whole economy is based our ability to produce surpluses and then redistribute them”, but onto what surplus is spiritually, and who should own surplus. He questions if surplus comes from human effort, or is bestowed on us by nature. He examines when surpluses have, historically, been at all time highs, and claims that it is when individual conciousness is expanding most quickly (i.e. the renesaince, and right now).

But in between all this good stuff, is a practical suggestion that we establish a basket commodity currency backed simultaneously by both wheat and gold (because they both represent two different aspects of money, the wheat=agriculture=credit =spiritual and gold=land=value=matter. And that the currency be governed by a centralized non-governmental world body. Well, I don’t buy this. It’s not a solution comensurate problems it purports to solve. For one, how can a backed currency ever be sufficient? Also, one of the clear goals that he points out of a currency, that of matching the economic activity in the economy, is just not possible in any centrally managed currency where the matching is being doing by people trying to observe the economy. Currencies should do this by internal design, not by an external process. It also means that the locus of control of the currency has simply been moved from one central agency to another, which does not solve the fundamental requirement of making money truly democratic. The high level transnational economic organizations that exist at the behest of national governments (IMF, World Bank, WTO, etc) don’t appear to be very democratic to me, nor do they seem to serve the interests of the people to me.

What’s a better solution? Open money of course.

[tags]money,Christopher Houghton-Budd,wheat,gold,currency,community currency[/tags]

heaven & hell

Published on February 28, 2005 in funny and non-geeky. 1 Comment

In hell you are sitting at a sumptuous banquet but your arms are broken and in a cast and though with your fork you can pick up food but you can’t bend your arms, so you can’t put it in your mouth! In heaven, everything is exactly the same, but you just feed the person next to you.

[tags]heaven,hell,joke[/tags]

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, the Spirit of Evolution, Second Edtion, by Ken Wilber (2000)

Published on February 1, 2005 in books and non-geeky. 0 Comments

This sprawling work requiresmuch more than a small description here, which I will do some time (probably as so many others have), but I’ve gotta gripe about it. I wish Mr. Wilber were a better writer, or he would let an editor fix his incredibly repetitious prose. Many people have told me that Wilber is dense and hard to get through, but it’s not really that dense. The book is indeed a brilliant synthesis of a whole bucket load of ideas, but the each section is so over belabored that it gets tiresome. Well that’s the gripe, the things I like best about it are: holons, a synthetic world view which includes a social and individual component of the interior as well as exterior (the four quadrants), ascenders vs. descenders, Plotinus, and the necessary interrelatedness of macrocosmic and microcosmic evolution.

The big problem with this book, is that he states, but does not satisfactorily demonstrate, the claim that the interior/subjective and the exterior/objective are on the same footing. I believe this, but I’m still looking for someone who can really demonstrate it.

Bone, Complete one volume edition, by Jeff Smith (1991-2004)

Published on February 1, 2005 in books and non-geeky. 0 Comments

I have a real soft spot for a good graphic novel now and again, and this one really hit the spot. The story is interesting, the characters are amazingly engaging, and the art is just fantastic. What’s most amazing about Bone, is that it doesn’t takes an unusual position of litterary self-awarenes. It doesn’t take itself completely seriously, like so many of them do, but it’s also not all silly. So while the monsters are at some points just clearly silly and out of character, i.e. discussing whether to eat their next victims raw or in the form of a quiche, or calling eachother fat, they are also downright monster scary. It’s tough to pull this off, but I, for one, was willing to suspend disbelief and really get into the story, not despite the silliness, but because of it.

blogging

Published on January 26, 2005 in non-geeky and random. 0 Comments

Back in 1995, when I was madly collecting web resources for the second edition of my book, The Internet Directory (by the way, don’t buy it unless you are an Internet historian), I kept coming across people’s personal jounals. I read all kinds of stuff that to me seemed incredibly inappropriate to be made public for the whole world to see. I just couldn’t imagine why people would want to divulge their private lives in such a fashion, and I assumed it was just a modern form of hubris. So I decided that these Web sites wouldn’t be included in the book, it just wasn’t interesting enough for my readers (I thought), and besides there were so many of them, they would just be taking up space.

As of today, technorati is “watching” 6,481,744 weblogs. It appears that I was wrong. Public journaling turns out to be one of the webs killer-apps.

When I told a friend that I had started a blog, she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, no! your not going to be another blogger!” This is a fascinating sentiment. Since the very begining of the web, people have put their jounals on-line, but blogging as it has now developed is something altogether different. It’s more accurate to view it as a collective journal of humanity. Most of our individual journal entries are mundane and quite boring, even for ourselves to go back and look at (like this one!) but some entries, get at a bigger truth of our lives and reflect the greater experience of what it is to be human, and so it is with blogs. Taken as a whole, they provide something quite similar.

[tags]blog[/tags]